Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Byrne is right, new electoral map 'is of, by and for Democrats, (and) places self-serving political advantage far above the public's interest'

Dennis Byrne's column today, GOP can't catch a break on fairness, accurately slams the state's new political boundaries as grossly partisan contrivances rammed into law by opportunistic Democrats.

Even the court that upheld the map called it "a blatant political move to increase the number of Democratic congressional seats."

However I'd underscore a point Byrne doesn't quite come out and make, which is that gross opportunism and cynical mapping isn't a partisan attribute: If the Republicans had been in control (which they will be in Illinois one of these decades), they would have done the exact same thing to the Democrats.

Byrne, again accurately, notes that controlling parties can game the system in this way because the law has allowed and even encouraged

efforts to craft congressional maps as an instrument of social engineering, particularly as a means to redress past and allegedly continuing racial discrimination.

I challenge the notion that there's anything "alleged" about continuing racial discrimination, but otherwise, yes. This problem -- and it is a problem -- is rooted in the idea that there's something discriminatory and unfair about any electoral system that doesn't all but automatically give large minority groups proportional representation in legislative bodies.

It's also rooted in trying to overlay this idea onto the idea that political interests are primarily defined by geography, something that's certainly less true today than it was in the early days of our democracy.

The kludges necessary to try to accomodate both these ideas at once allow for plenty of room for mischief-making by partisan map-makers.

At the very least, I'd take it out of their hands and leave re-mapping to a non-partisan panel that the courts would require take seriously the legal instruction that districts be "compact."

At best, I'd like color-blind, computer-drawn districts and wards with as many straight boundaries as possible, and let the minority chips fall where they may.

Posted at 01:48:22 PM

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Though it would never happen, Illinois needs to follow the Iowa remapping system. Which, to a large extent, takes the mapping process out of the craven hands of politicians. However, the disparity in viewpoints among Iowans is probably much narrower than the disparity in viewpoints among Illinoisans (Illinoians?), so getting Iowans to go along with its process was easier than it would ever be (never) in Illinois.

I get that people think "straight lines cannot be corrupt" but in practice, very few boundaries are straight. Just look at the census blocks in Illinois: http://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/blk2000/st17_Illinois/ Lots of squiggles and curves and jagged bends. Straight lines can cross town, county, and neighborhood boundaries in ways that make no sense in practice.

It can be hard to tell, at a glance, which crooked lines are that way because that's how other boundaries go, or because somebody with juice wanted it that way. So I'm not saying crooked is good, just that straight isn't always the way to go.

ZORN REPLY -- So what? The current system doesn't follow census tracts either. Legislators serve wildly diverse districts. Big deal if a state legislative or congressional boundary goes right down Main Street in a small village.
The obsession with geography is very 18th century. I have more in common in nearly every way with people who live in neighborhoods three miles from my house than I do with people who are just across a nearby busy avenue, but we are represented by different aldermen, state legislators and congressmen. I deal with it just fine.

Sure enough, a map purely drawn by...say a computer is a fair way of doing it. But it's also fair the current way because if Republicans were the majority, the redistricting maps would favor them. Neither party determines which is in the majority, the voters make that decision.

ZORN REPLY -- I'm not sure voters are as on-board with this as you seem to think. Sure, I was happy that the Democrats won the right to hold every lever of power when it comes to the re-map, but that doesn't mean I'm happy, in general, with the system that gives them this kind of power.
My guess is if you held a referendum on this question, you'd find most voters prefer a method that's more neutral, more "fair," less partisan, almost no matter how partisan they are. Because when the rules to any game are unfair, they're corrosive and destructive in the long term.

I see, Eric. So you agree that the mapmaking was devioius and self-serving, but the other party would have done it too so if it's going to happen anyway, its better that your side do it. Justifying behavior like this by pointing fingers and claiming your evil adversaries would've done the same thing (or worse) is part of a never-ending cycle that facilitates a moral race to the bottom, resulting in political corruption to the degree we see it today.

An independent board with authority to draw the map would be a step in the right direction. I"m sure the board would be corrupted over time, as most government is in this state. That being said, at least it would be taken out of the hands of people who personally benefit from the maps being drawn a certain way.

@Rick B - Did you even read what Eric wrote? I don't see Eric in any way "justifying" the current process regardless as to which side does it. As a matter of fact, he espouses a solution that is far less "progressive" than many others cast him because he'd let the "minority chips fall where they may" . . . .

Partisan gerrymandering is not "devious," illegal, or unfair. It *is* unfair, and hypocritical, to be shocked and appalled by it only when the other side does it. And that's the problem with the criticism directed at Democrats this time. It would be political malpractice not to seek electoral advantage through this process. The Republicans would surely do the same. Anyone criticizing Democrats for partisan gerrymandering must, I think, point to a time when they criticized Republican partisan gerrymandering with equal vigor in order to have any credibility.

If the question on the table is, "Should we abolish partisan gerrymandering," I would vote yes, and hand everything over to a computer, and have the law take effect well into the future so that current or foreseeable benefit would not enter into the decision. But if the question is, "Should Democrats refrain from partisan gerrymandering out of the goodness of their hearts, when Republicans across the country never have and never would," then the answer is an emphatic, "Hell, No!"

EZ and others, what do you mean when you talk about fairness in redistricting? Fairness to who - parties, individual voters, voters taken as a whole, discrete interests, politically significant communities, or minority groups? I think it's important to define the problem we're trying to solve before jumping to a solution.

For my part, I think that fairness to voters, taken as a whole, is the best goal. And I think the fairest map according to that standard is one where the partisan balance of the state's delegation (to the US House or state legislative body) most closely matches the state's overall partisan balance. For example, in a state where 60% of the voters are Democrats, and 40% are Republicans, 60% of the delegation should be Democrats, and 40% should be Republicans. There are obviously measurement problems here, but this is my ideal, and I think we can approximate it reasonably well.

Interestingly, if I remember right, empirical studies show that states in which Democrats totally control the redistricting process tend to come closer to this goal than states where control is split between the parties or controlled by an independent body, and those states do better than states controlled by Republicans.

This isn't because Democratic legislators are fairer-minded than Republican ones, but because Democratic voters tend to live clumped together more than Republican voters, which gives Republicans a natural advantage. That advantage is basically balanced out by the advantage that Democrats have when they control the redistricting process. When the districts are drawn by a neutral body, the natural Republican advantage is not counterbalanced; when they're drawn by Republicans, the natural imbalance is reinforced.

There's a great book on this subject called "The End of Inequality" by Stephen Ansolabehere and James Snyder. Some fascinating political and legal history - before reading it, I had no idea that states used to frequently go for decades without redrawing district lines. As you can imagine, this led to some pretty interesting political problems, mostly related to the wild over-representation of relatively empty areas. Anyway, highly recommended.

I agree with JakeH and also with just about everything that Eric wrote. I also agree that there is something to the argument that the voters choose the party who is going to do the redistricting, and that should reduce the complaining somewhat. I like the idea of a computer model picking the districts over an independent board, but someone has to program the computer, which means that true independence isn't possible under any system.

I think Byrne's point about "alleged racial discrimination" was meant to highlight that it's not as widespread as believed and/or it's pretty much written out of the law. I think that's as good as we're going to get.

ZORN REPLY -- Maybe the answer is to let both parties draw proposed maps and then flip a coin to see which one gets used. It might be that this would inspire both sides to agree to craft more representational maps out of the fear/understanding that chance might leave them with the other side's map.
A version of the old you-split, I-choose method of dividing a candy bar that we learned as kids.

I'm a straight line kind of guy. Anything else reeks of corruption, regardless of which party is behind it. Moreover, I see no reason to draw districts to ensure some sort of racial proportionality in representation. I don't see anything in the Constitution that guarantees that, and that includes due process and equal protection. In addition, creating partisan districts increases the probability that representatives who are closer to the extremes rather than the center will be elected, be it conservative whites or the (almost universal) liberal blacks.

I'm with MCN. I believe that the districts should be, insofar as is possible considering population requirements and political and natural boundaries, square, which I think is the intent of the "compact" criterion that is so frequently ignored. I've also seen the argument, which I believe is a good one, that districts drawn to ensure the election of representatives of a particular ethnic persuasion, such as Luis Gutierrez's wildly gerrymandered 4th, may succeed in that goal, but actually serve to limit the number of representatives of that ethnicity, because they don't stand a chance in other districts.

MCN, there's no reason to think that straight-line districts are more competitive, or less partisan, than squiggly ones. Think about Illinois - if you wanted to maximize the number of districts where the partisan balance of voters was close to 50-50, you'd have a bunch of districts shaped kind of like pizza slices radiating out of Chicago that included some Chicago voters, some suburban voters, and some rural voters. These districts would necessarily be "ugly" and would not be at all square-shaped or defined by straight lines. So choose - do you want competitive/moderate districts or straight-line ones? You can't have both.

And come on, EZ, what makes you think that politicians would be "inspired" by the coin-flip method to create more representational maps? What does representational mean, anyway? Wouldn't their incentive to be to create the most unbalanced map they could (whatever that means), since they have a 50-50 chance of having it adopted without having to actually vote for it, which could make individual politicians look bad? There's no deterrent effect that I can see, since under your plan, one side has to win, and one side has to lose.

The question that I don't think anyone else has answered is: How does the Hispanic population in the state of Illinois increase by a third in the last decade, and yet Luis Gutierrez continues to represent the ONLY majority Hispanic congressional district in the state? How does that not fly in the face of the Voting Rights Act?

Taxpayer: I don't agree. It is obvious that many districts are drawn to either ensure reelection of incumbents or to ensure that a minority representative is elected. In the case of the former, there will be a greater concentration of persons who support the incumbent's view, which may or may not be partisan slash "more extreme". In the case of the latter, it is a deliberate attempt to isolate minority voters (who tend to be liberal), who will support a liberal minority candidate, which has two consequences: 1) That candidate will often be more liberal than his voters, and 2) by isolating white voters, who tend to be conservative, there will tend to be more conservative voters who can take hard right positions. With blended districts, in which candidates must compete for votes from a broader spectrum of voter beliefs, a candidate will likely be more centrist.

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